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Just one question for all the "nay-sayers" (and anyone else that cares to comment)
dragonace
Member UncommonPosts: 1,185
If Vanguard is such a "crappy" game and doomed for failure, why does Vanguard's forum have almost as many posts as the Top 5 hyped games in development COMBINED?
Top 5 Hyped Games in Development:
#1 WAR - 4037
#2 Age of Conan - 1608
#3 Pirates of the Burning Sea - 1208
#4 The Chronicles of Spellborn - 349
#5 Tabula Rasa - 769
Total: 7971
The evil Sigil/SoE spawn:
Vanguard - 7733
Comments
You already know the explanation. This board is popular because it is filled with drama. Fanboys who love the game vs. beta-testers and people from E3 who've played or seen it and think it is going to be the next Daikatana.
Also, the game gets a lot of posts because it is so inacessible. . . most MMOs are moving away from the things that kept it a niche genre in it's birth (like long travel times, xp grinds, corpse runs, xp debt, etc.) Lots of interesting discussions are made about accessability vs. inaccessability.
Anyway, I hope Vanguard will be a really good game. My interest in the game is in that I'm very curious to see if an extremely inacessible game (that is also good) can be a success. My worry is that after having seen it at E3, they will deliver something that is crap. Hopefully, now that they are in bed with SOE, they are getting enough money to flesh out the content in the game, fix the animations, and get the game looking like the screenshots that are out there instead of how it looked at E3.
Vanguard has a lot of posts because there's a lot to discuss about Vanguard, not all of it positive. The fact that there are a lot of posts about SOE getting involved with the game, or about what the 'vision' means for people who don't want to be in a raid guild doesn't mean that the game is going to be good or successful.
yeah vanguard gets alot of attention indeed, and there is alot of people that love to hate on it. but i don't think that necessarily means it will be a huge hit or anything like that.
but i think that there is good reason why vanguard gets so much attention, and its not because everyone hates it otherwise nobody would care.
I think because there are a lot of old school elements that bring up good memories for some and bad for others. Why anyone would try so hard to bash a game before it's released I have no idea.
Unless...maybe its a new form of PR...competing MMO's send out trolls to bash other games in order to make theirs more popular in an effort to become the sole ruler of the MMO market and rule the universe with mind controlled drones that are implanted with subliminal messages....hmmm
all these ppl with positive or negative remarks on the game, are waiting to try it out...the soe issue is just a drama... and we all know how much ppl love drama.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
CS Lewis
Informative.
Oh yeah, I forgot which thread I was posting in. But on the subject of posts and members compared to the top 5 games Vanguard has over 100k members and almost 1.25 million posts. I would say they are going to do alright if they can even pull off a decent game.
I wasn't trying to "bash" or "hype" the game in this thread - just trying to get some opinions on why the Vanguard forum on this site is so much more active than any of the other forums.
I mean come on - if a game is supposed to be so great and hyped in the top 5 and there aren't even 1,000 posts on the forum - positive or negative. THAT would seem odd to me.
Any game is going to get both positive and negative posts. Any game that involves Brad McQuaid AND SOE is going to get more than it's fair share of negative posts, but then that's what generates activity on the forums and therefore more interest in visiting the forum and possibly even more posts.
There is no doubt that the SOE deal increased the posts/activity on this forum, but it was still far and away the leader at this site even before the SOE deal was announced; so to say that alone accounts for the number of posts is misleading. There is definitely something about Vanguard that draws people to this forum and to post.
Well, I'm hoping that the Betas starts to move along again by the end of July and we'll see if the Dev. team has made some more headway on getting the game out by sometime in Winter.
let's see.
Name Posts Approx Subscribers
EQ: : 4200 200K
EQ 2: 34000 175K
WoW: 57000 6.5 mil
SWG: 63000 150k
Oh noes! SWG must be the BEST game in the world!!!11111
nope, it is just the most talked about, and guess why? it is because of the incredible tales of light saber wielding jedis? ruthless bounty hunters? witty scoundrels?
Nope it is because of NGE and SOE.
Notice a trend?
Add that Vanguard has been in development a lot more than Age of Conan and WAR surely, the others i do not know, and that Vanguard site is actually full of informations while AoC has little, WAR also. Tabula Rasa has none while Pirates has a niche following as do Chronicles of Spellbourns, Hero's Journey and URU Live and you get nearer the truth.
"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime"
You bring up some good points though.
Vanguard has always been considered a "niche" title - even by the Devs themselves. So, why does it generate so much more activity on this site over other games that have a much higher hype score?
Why does Vanguard have so much more information on their site than any of the other titles? Especially for Age of Conan and Chronicles of Spellborn, both of which are targeted to be released Q4 2006.
I think this game is doomed because Brad is getting into bed with the darkside of "hardcore."
Now I've camped out in front of my computer, and I've been hardcore and extreme. I like a deep game and an immersive one.
What I don't like are all these "big raider clans" who come in with their "we won't group with nobody not on teamspeak," their "DKPs," their ePvPeens, and the like.
Brad's been hanging with the wrong crowd, and designing the game for the big lootin', big twinkin', non-roleplaying, "risk vs. reward" crowd. And seeing as how they manage their risk by stripping every last bit of the fun out of being in an online world, I say that unless you go into this game in one of the top twenty or so big raiding, multiplatform, 1337clanz, you got no business being in Vanguard.
I mean yeah, they'll take your money alright. They just won't give you much of a game to go with it.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
"I know I said this was my last post, but you my friend are a idiotic moron." -Shadow4482
If we are to believe what the Devs are telling us it's going to be a 20/60/20 split. 20% solo/small group casual. 60% regular group. 20% large guild/raiding. That mixture is supposed to carry through from beginning levels until the level cap. Not to mention the 2 different spheres of experience with diplomacy and crafting.
So, to say that unless you are in a big guild or love hardcore raiding you have no business in Vanguard; kinda flys in the face with what we are being told by the Devs. Now it could well be that they are lying, but I'm willing to reserve that judgement until the game comes out.
It doesn't fly in the face of what the devs have said at all, just with how certain elements have been trying to spin it. They've made very clear that if you don't raid, your gear will be worse than that of someome who does raid. In other words, you either raid or are distinctly second class. Sure, some items from raids will be tradeable (though not all), but that just means that you have to beg a raiding guild to pull an item out of their DKP system for you, which they're well-known for being loath to do. After all, as people who like raiding constantly point out, if non-raiders could get raid gear, raiding would lose it's luster.
Soloing obviously doesn't even require a guild, and group content certainly doesn't require a raid guild. But raiding is the realm of the "'big raider clans' who come in with their 'we won't group with nobody not on teamspeak,' their 'DKPs,' their ePvPeens, and the like," and in Vanguard your choices are simple: be clearly second-class, be in one of those clans, or beg for scraps from them.
QFT
If I as a solo player am only getting 20% of a game, then why are they going to charge me 100% the sub fee?
If I group from time to time, then I'll have 80% of a game. Yet they'll still charge me 100% of the fee.
So basically, the only ones that will have 100% of the game are those from the big raiders, who have shown across so many different games that they do not wish to play with anyone besides the ones they bring in with them.
If you can do raid content, small group content is what you do when not raiding. And when not raiding, or in small groups, soloing is easy, especially considering that they'll have the "doomsword of pwnage" that others won't have.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Hmmm, actually, you may get your wish for more accessibility.
Latest news is that Vanguard is changing the corpse run death penalty to something "easier" and "more accessible." Perhaps due to beta tester feedback that the old-style corpse runs are simply not a good idea.
Beta 3 Phase slated to begin end of July (possibly pushed to beginning of August at the latest). I would expect to see the final game mechanics (and graphics) hammered down during this phase.
Tens of thousands of new beta testers will provide a better atmosphere for testing and feedback than the relatively small amount of testers they have used so far.
Far as I am concerned, if they eased the corpse run mechanic, I don't think it would bother me very much at all. I am pretty old-school, and I sorta figure by this time I really have done about all the corpse runs I really need to do. But ... we'll see what happens.
And, while I don't want the game to be "easy-mode" if they also added something like "Recall to Bindpoint" teleportation, I think I'd pretty much like that convenience. The Devs did say that adding limited teleportation was definitely a Plan B -- if they felt they needed to do it.
However, I REALLY like the idea of a large seamless landmass, riding mounts, flying mounts, coastal boats, sea-faring boats and all that -- and no instances. Having no instances, yes, can be not quite so accessible, but I think it does tend to add more socializing when you wish to do dungeon crawls.
My only real "secret" desire is that -- since there are classes that look to be specifically made to take advantage of "wilderness" travel and combat (Ranger and Druid, for example) -- I'd like to see them add "a bit more" solo/casual content. Something above the currently planned 20 percent. This is not to change the game all out of whack, but just to provide "options" for anybody to use depending on your mood for the day.
The Devs seem to be very open with us explaining things on the official boards, and I think everything is not yet set in stone. I think Beta 3 is where we will finally see the game taking on its final shape. Hopefully, it will be to the liking of the greatest variety of players -- rather than just a sub-set of old-schoolers (like me).
I am still optimistic, but I want to get invited to Beta 3 so I can, hopefully, input my own comments about the games development. And, since there are so many who desire more accessibility and more solo content, I would probably recommend more of both -- in order to better balance things out.
~ Ancient Membership ~
wrong, they have not made it clear that all other gear will be worse than raid gear. i have been reading your posts for a long time and on my other account i have had discussions with you about this.
your argument is because your not able to get every single piece of gear ever made in the entire game that somehow that makes you "second class" or "worse" than a player that does because they raid.
am i right? even though what has been clearly said is that gear from small grouping will be just as good (meaning the quality is the same) as raid gear.
it has never been said that raid gear is a better quality than all other gear (ala eq1, eq2, wow) just that you can get different gear from raiding that you can from grouping, not necessarily "better"
yeah if you think that makes you weaker, because you don't have every single piece of gear imaginable that is fine.
but that statement i quoted by you is false and misleading, it doesn't make your gear "worse" if you don't raid.
wrong, they have not made it clear that all other gear will be worse than raid gear. i have been reading your posts for a long time and on my other account i have had discussions with you about this.
your argument is because your not able to get every single piece of gear ever made in the entire game that somehow that makes you "second class" or "worse" than a player that does because they raid.
am i right? even though what has been clearly said is that gear from small grouping will be just as good (meaning the quality is the same) as raid gear.
it has never been said that raid gear is a better quality than all other gear (ala eq1, eq2, wow) just that you can get different gear from raiding that you can from grouping, not necessarily "better"
yeah if you think that makes you weaker, because you don't have every single piece of gear imaginable that is fine.
but that statement i quoted by you is false and misleading, it doesn't make your gear "worse" if you don't raid.
So you're saying that you think they'll make gear that is harder to get (raid gear) worse than or equal to gear you can get from small group encounters?
no i am not saying anything, I'm going by what brad has said. and he has said the gear will be different but not better, i will try and dig the post up for ya.
EDIT:
no i am not saying anything, I'm going by what brad has said. and he has said the gear will be different but not better, i will try and dig the post up for ya.
EDIT:
Thanks for the information. Situational equipment that is the best for some situations and not others is a good thing.
no problem, i think the hard part will be is how to make raiding worth it for the raiders. and the gear you get from a raid should (in my opinion) be mainly focused on getting your guild ready for the next raid encounter.
meaning, if your next raid encounter was a boss mob that had a deadly fire aoe or fire based attacks.... then hopefully the encounter before that drops alot of fire resist gear, for example.
so basically the stuff that drops in raids is the best situational gear for raids but at the same time not superior to all other loot that drops in the world.
What, are you that Angerr guy? I think I'm remembering the name, but I'm definately remembering the word games.
No, you're simply wrong, and I've explained this to you before, but you continue to pretend that my argument is something that it isn't. I am not claiming that every piece of gear from a raid will be better than every piece of gear from the other 80% of the game, that's something you've made up. I am not arguing that not being able to get every single variety of item in the game is an issue, that's also something you've made up.
According to the devs, the best pieces of gear for a given class/build will come from a variety of sources; your best hat might come from crafting, while the best chest comes from a solo quest, and the best gloves come from raiding. This means that if you want the best gear for your class/build, your choices are to either raid or have inferior gear. Note carefully that I haven't said any of the stuff you keep pretending I did, like that every single piece of raid gear is better than every single piece of nonraid gear, or that for a given slot raid gear will always be the best.
In the past I've quoted a direct statement from one of the devs outlining specifically that this is how the loot quality will be set up, but I'm not going to bother to find it again; it's not like you bothered to read it before anyway. Another problem is that in these discussions, a lot of fans and fanboys will zip in to defend the 'vision' of having to raid if you don't want to be second class. Why don't you ever correct them?
Ahh yes, the usual word games. It certainly hasn't (to my knowledge) been said that every piece of raid gear will be better than every other piece of gear, or any other broad statement, but it certainly hasn't been said that non-raid gear will be equal to raid gear. I've quoted these items from the Silky Venom FAQ to you before, why do you continue to pretend they don't exist?